Location Based Is Not A Service

Ric Ferraro, Account Director at Golden Gekko, gives a resume of his speech at AppWorks in Oslo

OSLO- Appworks is one of the leading mobile conferences in Scandinavia (organized by Mobilen.no, famous for their Telecruise conference that takes place on a cruise ship) and it was a real pleasure to speak about Location-Aware apps during the 1-day event at the end of May.

The conference attracted a great mix of mobile entrepreneurs, developers and 'big guns' like Samsung, LG, Blackberry, Nokia and HTC, with a conference format running in parallel to a workshop format (Klubbscenen).

Location-based services were one of the main items on the day's agenda, so it was perhaps provocative of me to kick off my keynote by stating that Location-Based Services were extinct today. The reasons for stating this is that location is no longer a service but a feature that is embedded everywhere. You can see the full slide deck here:

App works olso location everywhere 05.2011 rf slideshare

View more presentations from Ric Ferraro

Location on mobile is also firmly in the mainstream today -with Facebook in particular achieving what Foursquare couldn't.I'm a big believer in the fact that contextual search (with mobile apps knowing what I'm more likely to be interested in according to time of day, previous searches, ambient temperature etc) will unlock the full potential of location. It is still early days for this, but as Google (and others) invest in research in this area and processing power on mobile devices keeps increasing, we will see some real examples of this soon.

There were some great presentations at the event by other speakers - I particularly enjoyed the ones by John Valentine (from SCVNGR), Megan Miller (on usability of iPad apps) and Ola Larsen (from RIM). Ola showed a video that I thought was pretty cool, on Hyper-Augmented Reality. You can see the video below and get an insight into what one version of the future of AR could be like. Enjoy!

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

The king of marketing Sir Martin Sorrell speaks about mobile in a keynote at MWC

It is always great to hear what the big boys have to say about the mobile world. Therefore, we were especially excited about Sir Martin Sorrell´s (CEO of WPP) speech at Mobile World Congress this year.

Here are a couple of the highlights:

- WPP sees huge potential for retailers and consumer brands to benefit from apps that tap into location and commerce. "Location targeting is the holy grail that we as advisers on behalf of our clients are looking for."

- "Applications will be a significant opportunity for retailers to open another virtual shop, with the added benefit of it being in consumers' pockets when they are out shopping."

- "Apps will always offer some features that mobile sites cannot, while remaining popular for regularly accessed content such as news, weather and train times."

- "It is likely that mobile apps will be the fat part of the curve in terms of usage, whereas the mobile internet will be the long tail."

It was refreshing to hear someone speak about the balance between apps and mobile websites, considering that marketers frequently take for granted that one will kill the other in a few years. Golden Gekko has always believed that they are complementary and don't compete. We recommend our clients  consider both channels, depending on target audience, richness and purpose.

The speech also highlighted that the industry is still in its fledging stages and major advertising groups such as WPP have barely dipped their toes in mobile yet.